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Monday, December 26, 2011

On PC members submitting papers

Update: Michael Mitzenmacher's posts (one, two, and three,
and the resulting comments) on implementing CoI at STOC are well worth
reading (thanks, Michael). The comments there make me despair that *any*
change will ever be implemented before the next century, but given that
we've been able to make some changes already (electronic proceedings,
contributed workshops, and so on), I remain hopeful.

For all but theory researchers, the reaction to the above statement is usually "don't they always?". In theoryCS, we pride ourselves on not having PC members submit papers to conferences. What ends up happening is:

You can't have too many PC members on a committee because otherwise there won't be enough submissions

The load on each PC member is much larger than reasonable (I'm managing 41 papers for STOC right now, and it's not uncommon to hit 60+ for SODA)

There's an ancillary effect that because of the first point, theory folks have fewer 'PC memberships' on their CV which can cause problems for academic performance review, but this is a classic Goodhart's Law issue, so I won't worry about it.

The main principle at play here is: we don't want potentially messy conflicts or complex conflict management issues if we do have PC members submitting papers. However, it seems to me that the practice of how we review papers is far different from this principle.

Consider: I get an assignment of X papers to review if I'm on a conference PC. I then scramble around finding subreviewers for a good fraction of the papers I'm assigned (I used to do this less, but I eventually realized that a qualified subreviewer is FAR better than me in most subareas outside my own expertise, and is better for the paper).

Note (and this is important) my subreviewers have typically submitted papers to this conference (although I don't check) and I rely on them to declare any conflicts as per conference guidelines.

Subreviewers also get requests from different PC members, and some subreviewers might themselves review 3-4 papers.

Compare this to (say) a data mining conference: there are 30+ "area chairs" or "vice chairs", and over 200 PC members. PC members each review between 5-10 papers, and often don't even know who the other reviewers are (although they can see their reviews once they're done). The area/vice chairs manage 20-30 papers each, and their job is to study the reviews, encourage discussion as needed, and formulate the final consensus decision and 'meta-review'.

If you set "theory subreviewer = PC member" and "theory PC member = vice chair", you get systems that aren't significantly different. The main differences are:

theory subreviewers don't typically get to see other reviews of the paper. So their score assignment is in a vacuum.

theory PC members are expected to produce a review for a paper taking the subreviewer comments into account (as opposed to merely scrutinizing the reviews being provided)

A downside of the two-tier PC system is also that there isn't the same global view of the entire pool that a theory PC gets. But this is more a convention than a rule: there's nothing stopping a PC for opening up discussions to all vice chairs.

One advantage of area chairs is that at least all papers in a given area get one common (re)viewer. that's not necessarily the case in a theory PC without explicit coordination from the PC chair and the committee itself.

But the main claimed difference (that people submitting papers don't get to review them) is false. Even worse, when submitters do review papers, this is 'under the table' and so there isn't the same strict conflict management that happens with explicit PC membership.

We're dealing with problems of scale in all aspects of the paper review and evaluation process. This particular one though could be fixed quite easily.